Students at a recent soup and bread lunch. Photo by Cecilia Brown.
Harris dining hall—now open until eight!—certainly pleases the masses with its ample seating and seemingly endless variety, from an impressive cereal selection to a new locally-grown salad bar. I cannot help but feel as though it has stolen the spotlight, overshadowing other dining services the school offers. As a staunch proponent of the small dining halls at Conn, I would be doing them an injustice if I did not pitch what is one of the best kept near-secrets Conn has to offer: the vegetarian and vegan dining hall in Freeman House.
“I think that one of the highlights of living in South – for me at least – is being so close to the Freeman Dining Hall! Freeman never disappoints me. I can always count on it for its fresh food, and wide selection of hearty grains, fruits, veggies and other vegetarian delicacies! You don’t even have to be vegetarian to appreciate the food that’s offered. It provides a healthy treat to all regardless of being a carnivore or not. My only complaint is that it is not open on the weekends!” says Arielle Wortzel ’14.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are Freeman’s glory days, with soup and bread for lunch and stir-fry for dinner. General Manager of Dining Services Mike Kmec provided me with the average figures from the past three weeks: on Tuesdays, 224 students eat lunch in Freeman, compared with 825 in Harris. As for Thursdays, the gap is even larger, with 202 students eating in the vegetarian dining hall and 924 in Harris.
At 11:40 and 1:05 on each of these days, Freeman swells with students in the know, anxiously anticipating a table overflowing with freshly baked loaves of bread, at least three different types of soup, and every two or so weeks, bread bowls! The dining hall’s small size—a characteristic it shares with those in JA, Knowlton and Smith—forces students to share relatively small circular tables with people they might not have known at the beginning of the meal. In Freeman, you’ll probably enjoy a nice conversation to accompany your vegetarian dish. If there is no more room or you have a large group accompanying you to the dining hall, the dining services staff tend to turn a blind eye to students bringing their food to the common room across the hall—or if it’s warm out, even to the green.
A better-kept secret than the Tuesday/Thursday lunches is what happens later in the day. Stir-fry regulars (on average seventy-six on Tuesdays and forty-two on Thursdays) know to get to Freeman as early as possible to load their plates with heaping piles of rice or noodles and various vegetables before lining up to use one of the four self-service griddles. Not only are stir-fry dinners a deliciously healthy alternative to dining hall food, it gives students on a meal plan the rare opportunity to cook for themselves and prepare their dinner precisely as they see fit—no napkin notes necessary. The dining staff washes pots and large spoons after each student/amateur chef has finished cooking, all so that we can enjoy this privilege twice a week.
Even for non-specialty meals, Freeman dining hall constantly offers food one could find nowhere else on campus. As it is the vegetarian dining hall, it has the freshest, greenest salad bar one could hope for. Additionally, perhaps because of the smaller influx of mouths they are feeding, the Freeman chefs are constantly supplying us with food of the best quality: creatively grilled vegetable mixtures, breads with an array of different ingredients and pasta like ravioli that taste homemade!
I hope that this recognition gives Freeman dining hall the thank-you it deserves, as it is most certainly my number one (relatively) unknown attraction on campus. •
